Critic Quotes

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.

It is one thing to do your dance on a beach and quite another to collaborate intimately with the sand.

A song to the oak, the brave old oak,
Who hath ruled in the greenwood long!

Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell
The first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise... and cultivate the delightfully vague.

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self.... The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

Let a single completed action, all in one place, all in one day, keep the theatre packed to the end of your play.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Back o'er the deep I turn my longing eyes,
And chide the wayward passions that rebel:
Yet boots it not to think, or to complain,
Musing sad ditties to the reckless main.
To dreams like these, adieu! the pealing bell
Speaks of the hour that stays not—and the day
To life's sad turmoil calls my heart away.

William Lisle Bowles
William Lisle Bowles
In holy music's golden speech Remotest notes to notes respond: Each octave is a world; yet each Vibrates to worlds beyond its own.

At about six in the morning of July 3, 1860, while I was watering my petunias, and thinking of nothing in particular, I perceived coming towards me, a tall, beardless, fair-haired young fellow, wearing a German cap and gold-rimmed spectacles.

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

C. K. Williams
C. K. Williams
There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time,
When asked 'Why a third?'
He replied, 'One's absurd!
And bigamy, Sir, is a crime!'

William Cosmo Monkhouse
William Cosmo Monkhouse
Save it all; you do not know the value things will come to have until the world grows dim around you, and your things —however doubtful in the changing light, things are what you have left. And all you have.

Greek the language they gave me;
poor the house on Homer's shores.
My only care my language on Homer's shores.
There bream and perch
windbeaten verbs,
green sea currents in the blue.

Odysseus Elytis
Odysseus Elytis
We will indulge in all those miscellaneous commercial operations, which when conducted on a small scale are called thieving, but a large scale, financing.

My father has always held out Scientology and auditing to be based purely on science and not on religious "belief" or faith. We regularly promised and distributed publications with "scientific guarantees". This was and has always been common practice. My father and I created a "religious front" only for tax purposes and legal protection 'from fraud Claims'. We almost always told nearly everyone that Scientology was really science, not a religion, but that the religious front was created to deal with the government.

Ephemerality is the little magazine's generic fate; by promptly dying it gives proof that it remained loyal to its first program.

Frederick Crews
Frederick Crews
Never work for a liberal employer, dear boy, they'll sack you on Christmas Eve.
Learned at his father's knee

The cinema gives us a substitute world which fits our desires.

Among the admirable American expressions which enter our language from time to time to lend it new vitality, there is one which I would have every audience, and every lecturer, use at the end of every lecture or course: So what? What does all this amount to.

Morn on the waters, and purple and bright Bursts on the billows the flushing of light O'er the glad waves, like a child of the sun, See the tall vessel goes gallantly on.

On me, on me
Time and change can heap no more!
The painful past with blighting grief
Hath left my heart a withered leaf.
Time and change can do no more.

There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.

T. E. Hulme
T. E. Hulme
The word "Silence" today sounds "bridegroom" or the "tragedy of love".